The quincunx, also called the inconjunct, is a 150-degree aspect. It gets skipped a lot, because it is not one of the five majors. Meanwhile it is the most awkward aspect in a chart, and it occurs more often than people assume.
Why 150 degrees is awkward
Count it yourself. Signs 150 degrees apart share nothing: no element, no modality, no polarity. Aries and Virgo, Taurus and Libra, Gemini and Scorpio. Fire and earth, cardinal and mutable, masculine and feminine.
Compare: a trine (120°) joins signs of one element, a sextile (60°) compatible polarities, a square (90°) signs of one modality, so at least they share a way of acting. The quincunx has no point of contact at all. Two planets in this aspect neither fight nor help each other; they simply have no common language.
How common it is
This can be computed. We took daily positions of nine planets across 90 years, from 1936 to 2025, which is 32,872 moments, and looked at all 36 pairs.
- Orb 2°: at least one quincunx present in 42.4% of moments
- Orb 3°: in 54.1%
- Average count at 3° orb: 0.88 quincunxes per chart
So roughly every second person has one. For comparison, by the same method at 2° orb the opposition shows up in only 24.4% of charts, which makes the quincunx nearly twice as common.
Which pairs form it most often
At 3° orb over the same period:
- Saturn and Neptune: 3.60%
- Jupiter and Pluto: 3.51%
- Saturn and Uranus: 3.43%
- Mercury and Pluto: 3.40%
- Jupiter and Neptune: 3.38%
- Sun and Neptune: 3.31%
One honest caveat belongs here: slow-planet pairs depend on the era. The clearest example from the same calculation is not a quincunx at all but the Neptune-Pluto sextile, which held within 2° orb for 26.5% of the entire ninety years. Slow pairs arrive in waves, so the percentages above describe 1936 to 2025 specifically, not all time.
In 2026 there is not one between the slow planets
We checked 2026 separately at six-hour steps. Between Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto there will not be a single quincunx, and not one day even at 3° orb. The closest approach is Jupiter and Neptune on 13 December, and that is still 4.6 degrees off.
Mars supplies five exact quincunxes to the slow planets:
- 13 February, 01:14 UTC: Mars in Aquarius to Jupiter in Cancer
- 17 August, 03:14 UTC: Mars in Cancer to Pluto in Aquarius
- 30 November, 06:20 UTC: Mars in Virgo to Neptune in Aries
- 5 December, 20:23 UTC: Mars in Virgo to Pluto in Aquarius
- 21 December, 04:13 UTC: Mars in Virgo to Saturn in Aries
Three of the five fall in December. If you have anything in the early degrees of Virgo, the end of the year will be noticeable.
How to read a quincunx in your own chart
The orb for a quincunx is kept small, usually two to three degrees, at most five for the lights. A wider orb turns the aspect into noise: at 5° it will be found in almost every chart.
The mechanism is simple. Two planets in a quincunx do not bother each other until both are called on at once. As soon as a situation needs both, you have to improvise again, because there is no ready way to combine them. Hence the signature: a theme you return to your whole life and solve differently every time, rather than once and for all.
The classic case is a quincunx to the Sun or Moon. It creates a persistent sense that something in life needs manual adjustment where other people get it for free. A pair of slow planets in a quincunx is felt more faintly and reads as generational background.
To find your own, you need a natal chart with an aspect table. Look for angles near 150 degrees, and do not forget the chart angles: a quincunx to the ascendant or the MC works the same way.
In short
The quincunx is 150 degrees between signs that share no element, modality or polarity. Across a 90-year calculation it is present in 42.4% of charts at 2° orb and 54.1% at 3°, which makes it more common than the opposition. In 2026 there is no quincunx at all between the slow planets, while Mars supplies five, three of them in December.
Try calculating your chart for free on AstroWay and see whether any of your pairs sit 150 degrees apart.